Mike – Finalizing Book Animation/Integration, Finish King Arthur’s Attack, King Arthur Rendering
Hessam – Render preparations, tweaking animations, and fixing new issues. Working on the navigation of the site and image galleries. Hours 29.5 – 90% of the goals total. 80% for the 3D stuff and rendering, and 100% for the website.
Lauren – Edited scenes for render, created new shave hair setup, began rendering, finished card art and finalized UI screens.
Tracy – Preparations for rendering, rendered most of Graveyard Daemon (the rest should be complete and on campus waiting for me!) and rendered Time Shift. The rest are still in the works. Basic coding tweaks while I wait for final artwork for the in game menus. Hours – 16.5 – 80% of my overall goal (100% of my programming goal since I didn’t set out to complete a lot this week and about 75% of my 3D goal due to long render times).
This week I spent mostly all of my time working on getting my renders started for all of the spell effects. Unfortunately it took a bit longer to render than originally anticipated, but I was still able to complete most of the Graveyard Daemon effect and all of the Time Shift effect. When I tried to render Deus Ex Machina with a foggier shader on the orbs that wipe across the screen, it just didn’t look right, so I don’t have the final render for that yet. As for Personification and Frankenstein’s Lightning, I’m going to be completing them this week because they require reflections and I had enough issues trying to tweak Graveyard Daemon so it didn’t have 10 minute renders per frame.
Here is what I have so far of Graveyard Daemon (up to frame 66) the rest SHOULD be rendered in the labs and I will check when I’m on campus tomorrow (up to frame 180).
I was also able to render out all of the Time Shift spell effect since those frames didn’t take nearly as long
Also, in case you didn’t see it from earlier this week, here is a link to the corrected main game menus. Once I get the finalized artwork from Lauren broken into the proper layers I’ll layout a more finalized design. Menu
This week I worked 16.5 hours (most of it in the labs prepping for renders during our render party). I accomplished about 75% of what I wanted to finish since I did manage to render these and my other scenes are nearly set up and ready to go for this week. The rest of my time was spent tweaking the game menu functionality earlier this week.
For next week I’d like to finish the rest of my renders and begin compositing them together with the library background. Again, I’d like to spend some more time on coding but it depends on how the renders go because I know that is high priority for us right now.
So, this week we had our render session and as far as Tiny Tim went, I think it was a great start. I went down to start setting up the scenes for the renders around 5:30pm on Wednesday. It basically involved importing all of the lights for the library scene and adding in the extra lights necessary for our individual characters.
Tiny Tim is the smallest character in the game, so I gave him a few extra lights. For him I needed to set up 3 passes: the character, shadow and hair pass. For the attack, I spend a couple hours setting it up into different layers and lighting them. I set them up to render over the weekend.
Another chunk of time was spent on re-creating Tim’s hair (due to the clipping and scaling issues I had earlier) and inserting the hair mounted on a dummy head and hat textured with a shadow-receiving UseBackground material. That head was then added to all the animated scenes so that his new hair could move with the rest of the body.
Here are a couple of the renders completed – taking damage and the idle. (I had to re-render the Take Damage after rendering from the wrong camera)
Percent done: 35-40%
Hrs: 16
This week I got some new card-art renders from my teammates and I adapted the type on each card for the characters so we can continue to move forward with getting the physical cards printed. The card’s design had to be shifted around only slightly to accommodate the 1/2″ section for the glyphs that will help bring the physical and digital aspect of the game together.
Percent done: 95% (just need a few more renders)
New Cards:
In order to get an idea of how the other menus will look with the borders and buttons, I mocked up some examples of the library menu and the card info menu.
Percent done: 100%
Opening
Library
Quizzes
Cards
Hrs: 4
On the whole, I got two out four layers of two animations rendered, which is more than I had hoped to have started. I had passed the design of the attack interfaces back to Ben, and I finally got Tiny Tim’s card art finished, which is something I had meant to have done a while ago. Overall, I’d say about90% of what I wanted to get done, I would have been happier with less setbacks in the rendering department, mainly.
This coming week, I’d like to have the attack rendered out (all 9 layers) as well as the library and hair passes for the two animations above.
Week 3 was a very busy and productive week for me. I had a very bad accident last week, and I had to go to different body shops, dealing with the police and insurance, etc. But this is not an excuse, and all the job is done, and project is moving along. (If you are curious what happened, my car was parked, and it started to move down in a drive way and hit a house, and apparently the owner of the house is making a great deal out of it.) Let’s get into the breakdowns:
3D stuff:
As I mentioned in my last week’s post, we were planing to render. There were some changes in the files, and I had to do a lot of tweaking on my animation, and that took most of my time last week. I set the right scale and position before starting animating as you can see in this picture from last term’s post. So, I had to scale down the character, and there were some issues with the rig that didn’t let me to scale and rotate the character properly. Jason helped me out and it’s all good now. Because of these changes, all the accessories that were attached to Robin’s Hood, needed adjustment and in some case re -animating. For example for my Defeat animation, when Robin let go of the Arrow, his bow would jump to the place that it was animated originally, so I had to animate the bow again, and it took me few hours to adjust everything. For my attack animation, Ben suggested me to add some effects for consistency with others. I decided to add a fire effect to the arrow, and that required extending the length of the animation. I added 3 more seconds when he pulls the arrow so the fire effect is long enough to be seen. For the fire effect I used Maya Fluid examples and tweaked it until I get the result that I want. I spent roughly 8 hours to redo the second half of the animation plus the effect. Here is a short test render of the effect:
I have finished rendering the defeat and the default animation, and as I am writing this post the attack animation is being rendered (almost half way done!.) Below is a render example of one of the shots:
Due to a miss-understanding, I have to do one more animation, which is fairly easy. I thought Robin does not take damage and therefore doesn’t have a damage animation. I will animate this, and render it along with the Arrival animation, which is also ready to go. I also need to render the shadow passes, and I think they should be pretty fast.
Hours: 15 hours Percentage: 80% (of rendering)
Website:
The website took most of my time this week, and I had some good progress. There’s a learning curve for Drupal, and once you pass that, you are going to be fine. I am glad that I chose Drupal platform for this project, and I am learning a lot. As you may recall, I had a problem with getting the accordion effect to work in Drupal. As I said there are some modules for the accordion effect, but none of them meet our need. After spending some time with JavaScript, I decided to give jQuery UI module a shot. JQuery UI is an official plug-in from jQuery team that handles many of the modern effect for web pages, including accordion effect. Unfortunately, after 2 hours of trying, due to the complicated mark up of Drupal, and version incompatibility of Drupal’s jQuery and the available UI, I gave up on it. The problem was, it treaded the child menus the same way as as the parent menus, and made them nolinks. So, when you click on a character’s name, the child menu would expand but they wouldn’t functioning because jQuery UI would remove the links from them (just like the parents.)
I returned to writing my own code again. I didn’t get any useful feedback from Drupal community in my post here, and after a lot of tweaking, adding and replacing different functions, I got it to work!! you can track the progress of my work in this files, and as you can see I commented out each approach. This is how it works basically:
When the page loads, a function hide all the child menus, and remove the href attribute from Parent menus only. I replace the link provided by Drupal with anchor tag with this line of code:
$('li.expanded > a').attr("href", "#");
The only problem with this method is that you would get an anchor tag in the address bar which is not a big deal. Then another function adds a HTML class to the selected menu, and slides up the child items for the clicked menu, and another function remove the class and slides down all the expanded menus. The tricky part was to order of these functions. Then I added two more line to my code so everytime you go to a page, the child menus of that page remains open. For example when you go to the Billy Pilgrim’s profile page, the Billy Pilgrim’s menu is expanded upon the loading of the page. These two lines do the magic:
Because I added some custom HTML classes via Javascript, some of the CSS attributes such as the hover states for the navigation and the typography are gone, and I need to modify the CSS a little bit.This took me about 7 hours, and you can try it out at : http://lexiconquest.com/characters.
My second goal for the website was to create an image gallery for the Gallery page. As far as the image galleries are concerned, there are many ways to do it in Drupal. This the path that I chose after some research:
First I installed the Content Construction Kit module that allows me to create custom fields for drupal. One of these fields is the upload field that is required to submit an image to the site. Then I found a wonderful module called simply “image” that allows us to crop and generate thumbnails, and creates image galleries. Using the CCK, I created a node and use that as a dummy for these galleries. Then I used Thickbox module, which is pretty similar to Lightbox, and set it up for each gallery that I created. Right now I created only two galleries for Billy Pilgrim, and King Arthur, and for now I just used some of my photography as placeholders. If the time permits in future, I would like to spend more time in order to create even more advanced galleries, but for now this should be fin. You can preview the gallery at the link below, and please keep that in mind that there’s no CSS style for this gallery yet!
Lastly, I spent one hour for content population. For each character I added three sub pages; profile, Card Strategies, and Sample Quizes, and for each page I generate the custom URL and path.
Hours: 14.5 hours Percentage: 100%
Total:
Hours: 29.5 hours Percentage: 90%
Goals for next week:
My goal for next week is to finish the last animation for Robin Hood, the Damage animation, and then finishing all the renderings of the animation and shadow passes, and composting them. For the website I will work on the cycle image gallery for the home page, which I have no idea how to deal with it! and If I get extra time work on the “Random quick facts” call out which is another concern for me.
This week I did deviate from my Gantt chart a bit, as explained below. There are two videos below that show some samples of what was done this week.
First up is the book animation. As you saw in previous posts there were issues integrating the book into the rest of our animations. With this newest iteration of the book some things have changed. The biggest of course are the integration issues, now everyone can translate, rotate and scale the entire book animation. The second biggest change in the book comes in the form of dynamics. The toss in section of the animation is now a dynamic simulation that has been baked into the scene. I still do a switch between a high and low poly version of the book for the transition from toss to page turn.
The second video I am going to show you is the newest playblast of King Arthur’s attack, the sword tip particles have been added. The animation is now ready for rendering, provided there are not any more final tweaks that are needed.
In my gantt chart you will see that King Arthur’s arrival animation was supposed to be completed. That has been pushed back to this week due to the issues with the book animation.
This week I have worked 20 hours. I would say I accomplished about 90% of what I wanted to this week. I say ninety percent because even though King Arthur’s intro is not complete the book has been redone, which was not originally planned. I wish I could have gotten more rendering done, even so a good chunk has still been completed. In my Gantt chart for next week I will be working on King Arthur’s into and more rendering.
The team all-night rendering party was a huge success. It was nice to have a large chunk of time to work as a group and solve problems together. Rendering for Tripod entailed quite of a bit of re-animating and setup. Rendering completed thus far:
Tripod Idle Character Pass w/ reflections
Tripod Idle Shadow Pass
Tripod Idle Environment Pass
Tripod Defeat Character Pass w/ reflections
Tripod Defeat Shadow Pass
Tripod Defeat Environment Pass
Tripod Defend Character Pass w/ reflections
Tripod Defend Environment Pass
Hours on Tripod: 16
Programming has been completed for the maneuver assignments and tracking. As you can see in the video maneuvers are activated and assigned to cards in play and automatically applied if the maneuver matches a required maneuver card for the character before it is able to attack.
This week I believe I accomplished 90% of my goal with 21 hours.
Next week will consist of completing the final 2 Tripod renders and compositing them all. Programming will consist of getting HP to work on the cards as well as the player. Play box will officially be done Wednesday!! Just in time for the Lexiconquest weekly All Nighter Til The End party.
The start of the week had me preparing for the Rend-O-Rama, setting up organizational documents, figuring out the right way to set up shadow passes, tweaking and establishing various render settings, etc. This is hard to really show progress for but preparation took a bit of time. Additionally, I tweaked the lighting and finally got some nice shadows, and populated the book shelves:
Rend-O-Rama Set Up 5 hours, 100% Task Completed
The Rend-O-Rama went pretty well, with the bulk of Tin Man getting completed, though not quite all, as I had hoped. As per usual, a small host of problems arose. The most curious of which was a problem where one Tin Man frame, which took about 3 minutes within Maya, would take at least tin minutes to do in batch or command line. It’s still an issue now, but I’ve contacted Chris and he’s teaching me a work around. I’ll be sure to keep you posted. But overall, it was good time. We utilized a shared spreadsheet Google doc to keep communication open about progress. The best aspect, though, was being able to simply turn to one side and ask for help when we need it. I would like to make this a weekly thing, personally, and whoever wants to show up can.
Anyway, here is what has been accomplished in terms of rendering for me:
Tin Woodsman Attack Animation Character Pass
Tin Woodsman Attack Animation Shadow Pass
Tin Woodsman Attack Animation Library Pass
Tin Woodsman Default Animation Character Pass
Tin Woodsman Default Animation Shadow Pass
Tin Woodsman Default Animation Library Pass
Tin Woodsman Damage Animation Character Pass
Tin Woodsman Damage Animation Shadow Pass
Tin Woodsman Damage Animation Library Pass
So that leaves Tin Woodsman Arrival rendering, which I hope to have finished early this week. Nothing is compositied together yet, though I have set up a sample Nuke file that everyone will be able to utilize when we’re ready for that. Ideally, by the end of this week, I’ll have something finished and ready to not only show you but also get into the Flash programming by Jason and Tracy.
Rend-O-Rama 8 hours+ Tin Woodsman Rendering, 85% complete.
Also, while I was rendering, I worked on a particle animation for when the Arrival books open up. Look for that soon, after I refine it a bit more.
Update: Nevermind, apparently this work has completely disappeared…
Book Opening Visual Effects 0%
By the day after, I had my fill of working on 3D stuff, so I took a quick break and developed some of the in-battle UI, specifically the Attack Banners (labels that rest on the top of the screen while a character uses its attack) and Attack Descriptions, little panels that will come up on the screen when a player goes to use his or her attack. They use assets created by Lauren, so the look is consistent. Here are two samples:
Attack UI: 3 Hours, 95% done (some fact checking might change the details of the attacks).
So, yeah, good week. Expect Tin Man to be done fo-realz this week, with more work on Billy to follow.
